Opinions
‘Because of sex’ approach to protecting trans people
Many analyses of Bostock decision missed the real history
“Here, I thought, looking around me, is where it all changed, because I was still too young to understand that history is not simply made up of moments of triumph strung together like pearls. I didn’t know that large changes were made up of many small ones, and of moments of suffering and backsliding and incremental, selective progress; unnecessary sacrifices and the opportunistic, privileged and lucky walking forward over the vulnerable and the dead.” —Carmen Maria Machado
The road to LGBTQ equality has been long and winding, made up, legally, of two paths — sex (gender) stereotyping and “because of . . . sex.” Until the Bostock decision last month we had a quantum mechanical, “Schrödinger’s Cat” causal conundrum — would the decision be based on “sex” as written in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or “sex stereotyping” as developed in the landmark 1989 Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins Supreme Court decision? Many guessed it would be the former, “because of . . . Gorsuch” and his penchant for textualism, but that didn’t stop plaintiff Aimee Stephens’ lawyer, David Cole, from arguing with the latter. Turns out it was the former, but before I trace the social history of that path, I would like to point out a delicious irony.
It’s long been understood that the modern Supreme Court rarely leads, and usually follows, public opinion. That opinion is shaped by the people, and primarily by the people’s activist corps. In the case of the gay rights movement, the people universally known through the 1960s as homosexuals became known in the 70s as gay people. Why? Because the “sex” in “homosexual” directed one’s gaze to sex acts, which is still what most Americans conjure in their minds when they hear the word “sex.” And since many were repelled by the thought of gay sex, it became evident a different, de-sexed, label was necessary.
Similarly with the trans community, which had been universally known as the transsexual community through the 1980s, and which de-sexed “transsexual” to “transgender” in the ‘90s (the first national trans rights group, founded by Riki Wilchins and Denise Norris in 1993, was called “Transexual Menace,” and the second, was the “National Transgender Advocacy Coalition,” in 1999), and then finally just the single syllable “trans” in the aughts, to match the single syllable, “gay.” Language matters. Just as Americans viewed homosexual people through the lens of their sex acts, they viewed transsexual people the same way, often reduced to sex workers and homicidal maniacs (“Dallas Buyer’s Club,” 2013 and Hitchcock’s classic, “Psycho,” 1960).
So, today, gay and trans individuals have their employment rights, and soon full protections with the Equality Act next year, because of a return to the modern source of those rights, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and “because of . . . sex.” Not gender, but sex, and, refreshingly so, but devoid of any implications of sexual activity. Justice Gorsuch, interestingly, returned to using the archaic term “homosexual” throughout his opinion, but did not revert to “transsexual,” and treated Ms. Stephens respectfully in his comments.
How did we get here? In the weeks following the decision many of the analyses of the decision missed the real history. That history is written by the victors, but it also very much matters which victors do the writing.
The path of “because of . . .” and “but for” sex began in the 60s, as Justice Gorsuch mentioned: Not long after the law’s passage, gay and transgender employees began filing Title VII complaints, so at least some people foresaw this potential application.
Trans persons won some lower court decisions in the ‘70s, before the religious and feminist backlash began in 1979 with Janice Raymond and then the Reaganites. Trans plaintiffs lost in the late ‘70s and ‘80s because transsexualism was not recognized as a form of sex (Holloway v. Arthur Andersen, 1977, Sommers v. Budget Marketing, 1982 and Ulane v. United Airlines, 1984). And then, in 1989, came Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, and the landscape utterly changed for trans plaintiffs.
The first, and until Bostock, only SCOTUS decision (and victory) for a trans plaintiff occurred in 1994, in a unanimous Eighth Amendment decision written by Justice Souter on behalf of the plaintiff, a black trans woman, Dee Farmer. The next federal appeals court case, and the first in a string of victories leading to Bostock, was Smith v. City of Salem in 2004, won on both sex and sex stereotyping concerns, followed by another Sixth Circuit case, Barnes v. City of Cincinnati in 2005. Philecia Barnes was also a black trans woman and she won “because of sex.” The only hiccup in this long chain of victories was Etistty v. Utah Transit Authority in the 10th Circuit in 2007. This was followed in rapid succession by the blockbusters: Schroer v. Billington, 2008; Glenn v. Brumby, 2011; and Macy v. Holder, 2012.
It was the unanimous Macy decision at the EEOC, led by Commissioner Chai Feldblum, that protected trans persons in all 50 states, and cemented the “because of sex” approach to protecting trans persons. Professor Feldblum, a major author of the 1991 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), had been living in Takoma Park, Md., in Montgomery County in 2007-08 when I led the campaign for Basic Rights Montgomery to pass and defend the county gender identity law. That law generated the first bathroom bill backlash in the United States, and Professor Feldblum, who had been a believer in the doctrine that trans status was a function of sex and, therefore, covered by Title VII, was further encouraged to pursue it if she ever got her chance in the federal government to make it a reality. Presciently, these were her words 20 years ago: “But a strict textualist approach might work as well (or even better) for those seeking to achieve broad protection for gay people and transgender people. Under such an approach, the intent of the enacting Congress (or state legislature) is not as important as the words the legislature chose to use.”
It had been obvious to me, as well, as I had been teaching and lobbying for years on the medical basis of transsexualism being rooted in brain sex. Research begun in 1995 had been making that very plain. But few LGBTQ attorneys, with the notable exception of Katie Eyer, believed in the possibility of progressive textualism, even though the Constitution is the product of the Enlightenment.
So after being nominated by President Obama to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and confirmed by the Senate, Professor Feldblum looked for the right case and found it in Mia Macy. She then did the same for David Baldwin in the first national gay rights victory, Baldwin v. Foxx, in 2015.
Just looking at these cases it was clear that the federal courts (and some state courts as well) were beginning to respect trans persons enough, including black trans women, beginning in the ‘90s to not only not summarily throw them out of court, but to seriously apply the “because of sex” and sex stereotyping arguments to them. All that at a time when fewer than 8% of Americans (in a 2013 poll) admitted to knowing a trans person; when gay people, far better represented in the media and known in their communities, were routinely failing in federal court. Yet there have been post-Bostock analyses by highly respected civil rights lawyers that turn this history on its head. For example, Shannon Minter, the trans attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), said: “We’ve always known that our legal arguments are strong and should be accepted, but the reason it took decades for the courts to accept these arguments was because transgender people were so foreign to the courts.”
This is not the first time. After promoting the trans legal case “because of sex” for years, I tried to get the national LGBTQ, and particularly trans, organizations to recognize our success post-Macy. They would have none of it. The lawyers at HRC, the National LGBT Task Force, and even NCTE, the National Center for Transgender Equality on whose board I sat, refused to acknowledge the breakthroughs. To get the word out I had to publish a pamphlet, with attorney Jillian Weiss and activist Riki Wilchins, which was promoted by Masen Davis and the Transgender Law Center, the only nationally oriented trans group willing to get on board. We were also supported by Tico Almeida and Freedom to Work.
Fortunately, thousands of trans persons got the message, and filed claims with the EEOC. Many won, with most settling out of court because, you know, the law matters. Yet others have lived the past eight years in fear and anxiety because our institutions’ lawyers repeatedly said that we had no protections without a decision of the Supreme Court. I countered that it would take years, or might never happen because we were winning all our cases, and without a split at the appeals court level the Court might not even take up the issue. Fortunately for us today, SCOTUS rolled us into the Circuit split on the gay rights cases (Bostock and Zarda), and we pulled the gay community along to victory. No gays left behind. We had not lost a Circuit Appeals case since 2007, the only one in the 21st century, so I, for one, was not surprised.
People who are committing themselves to activism need to understand the history so as to most effectively pursue their goals in the future. LGBTQ folks need to understand the bureaucratic resistance within their own movements, from the most well-meaning people. It is, indeed, always a long and winding road to liberty and equality.
Dana Beyer is a longtime D.C.-based advocate for transgender equality.
Opinions
Unconventional love: Or, fuck it, let’s choose each other again
On Valentine’s Day, the kind of connection worth celebrating
There’s a moment at the end of “Love Jones” — the greatest Black love movie of the 21st century — when Darius stands in the rain, stripped of bravado, stripped of pride, stripped of all the cleverness that once protected him.
“I want us to be together again,” he says. “For as long as we can be.”
Not forever. Not happily ever after. Just again. And for as long as we can. That line alone dismantles the fairy tale.
“Love Jones” earns its place in the canon not because it is flawless, but because it is honest. It gave us Black love without sanitizing it. Black intellect without pretension. Black romance without guarantees. It told the truth: that love between two whole people is often clumsy, ego-driven, tender, frustrating, intoxicating—and still worth choosing.
That same emotional truth lives at the end of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” my favorite movie of all time. Joel and Clementine, having erased each other, accidentally fall back into love. When they finally listen to the tapes that reveal exactly how badly they hurt one another, Clementine does something radical: she tells the truth.
“I’m not perfect,” she says. “I’ll get bored. I’ll feel trapped. That’s what happens with me.”
She doesn’t ask Joel to deny reality. She invites him into it. Joel’s response isn’t poetic. It isn’t eloquent. It’s not even particularly brave. He shrugs.
“Ok.”
That “OK” is one of the most honest declarations of love ever written. Because it says: I hear you. I see the ending. I know the risk. And I’m choosing you anyway.
Both films are saying the same thing in different languages. Nina and Darius. Clementine and Joel. Artists and thinkers. Romantics who hurt each other not because they don’t care — but because they do. Deeply. Imperfectly. Humanly.
They argue. They retreat. They miscommunicate. They choose pride over vulnerability and distance over repair. Love doesn’t fail because they’re careless — it fails because love is not clean.
What makes “Love Jones” the greatest Black love movie of the 21st century is that it refuses to lie about this. It doesn’t sell permanence. It sells presence. It doesn’t promise destiny. It offers choice.
And at the end — just like “Eternal Sunshine” — the choice is made again, this time with eyes wide open.
When Nina asks, “How do we do this?” Darius doesn’t pretend to know.
“I don’t know.”
That’s the point.
Love isn’t a blueprint. It’s an agreement to walk forward without one.
I recently asked my partner if he believed in soul mates. He said no—without hesitation. When he asked me, I told him I believe you can have more than one soul mate, romantic or platonic. That a soul mate isn’t someone who saves you — it’s someone whose soul recognizes yours at a particular moment in time.
He paused. Then said, “OK. With those caveats, I believe.”
That felt like a Joel shrug. A grown one.
We’ve been sold a version of love that collapses under scrutiny. Fairy tales promised permanence without effort. Celebrity marriages promised aspiration without truth. And then reality — messy, public, human—stepped in. Will and Jada didn’t kill love for me. They clarified it.
No relationship is perfect. No love is untouched by disappointment. No bond survives without negotiation, humility, and repair. What matters isn’t whether love lasts forever. What matters is whether, when confronted with truth, you still say yes.
“Love Jones” ends in the rain. “Eternal Sunshine” ends in a hallway. No swelling orchestras. No guarantees. Just two people standing at the edge of uncertainty saying: Fuck it. I love you. Let’s do it again.
That’s not naïve love. That’s courageous love.
And on Valentine’s Day — of all days — that’s the kind worth celebrating.
Randal C. Smith is a Chicago-based attorney and writer focusing on labor and employment law, civil rights, and administrative governance.
The United States and the world are waiting for the Supreme Court to hand down its decisions in two cases (Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ) that would rule on whether young trans women can play women’s sports at their schools. As trans journalist Erin Reed explained, these two cases are not just about transgender sports. These cases are litmus tests for trans rights at the nation’s highest courts and will have wide-reaching implications for the rights of trans and nonbinary people in the United States.
And these cases will impact cis women. As Orien Rummler reported for the 19th and them, anti-trans legislation and rulings threaten the rights of all women, especially cis women of color. The best example is the allegations that woman boxer Imane Khelif faced at the last Paris Olympics.
The gender policing that Khelif faced shows how sports bans that police who are considered a man or woman legitimize and mandate invasive medical testing, a form of medical abuse, against all women and girls who want to play sports. And let’s be clear — there is historical precedence for this.
The Nazi regime did use genetic screening in order to police who could have children as part of their “racial hygiene” programs, including marriage partner hereditary testing that flagged anyone with “tainted” genetic lineages. While prisoners in concentration and detention camps were subjected to horrifying medical experimentation, Nazi officials experimented with their own followers, facilitating reproduction only among people with desirable characteristics — notably those with blonde hair and blue eyes — and sterilizing those with undesirable genetics.
In fact, trans and gender non-conforming people were some of the first targeted by Nazi violence, with one of the first book burnings occurring in 1933 when Nazi youth and members of the Sturmabteilung ransacked the Institute for Sexual Science and burned one of the largest libraries of medical texts about gender affirming care. Nazi officials first exerted control over gender before extending this to race and religion.
And this was not confined to Nazi Germany. As I’ve written about before, the United States has used eugenics to justify the forced sterilization of women of color, disabled women, poor women, and incarcerated women. Forced sterilization was one part of forced or coerced medical testing that targeted Black and Indigenous women.
This medical violence, along with non-consensual experimentation including Dr. James Marion Sim’s gynecological experimentation on enslaved Black women, was rooted in systemic racism and medical abuse, and has contributed to legacies of mistrust and health disparities in medical institutions and practitioners.
When sports organizations, like the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, require women to undergo “sex verification,” they set a precedent of forced genetic testing that violates everyone’s privacy and could very well exclude many cis women from sports if they fall outside the bounds of what is defined as a “woman.”
The best example is cis women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Some people with PCOS have hyperandrogenism, an excess of androgen, or experience hirsutism (i.e. the development of more traditionally masculine features like increased muscle mass and more pronounced facial hair.) Mandatory sex verification may diagnose or “out” women as intersex without their consent. Differences of Sex Development, another term used to describe intersex experiences, is more common than most people would expect.
Would women with PCOS not be considered women? What about women with more pronounced facial hair or greater muscle mass because of natural variation? It’s important to note what is considered American standards of womanhood are rooted in White supremacy — one of the reasons why women of color have been and will be targeted by anti-trans violence.
The very people making these decisions are also beginning to ask these questions. According to Erin in the Morning, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is even worried about the implications of these two Supreme Court decisions. As Alejandra Carabello, a Harvard Law educator, told Erin in the Morning, a decision supporting anti-trans sports bans “could result in the segregation of women in a host of other areas of public life under the rationale that biologically, men are different and they need to be segregated.”
Barrett, a conservative justice who was appointed by Trump in 2020, seems to acknowledge these risks, saying “your whole position in this case depends on there being inherent differences.”
There is not. According to science, gender is not a strict binary but a spectrum determined by biological, psychological, and social factors, including cultural norms surrounding gender.
The best indication of this is that intersex people exist. Intersex people are individuals born with sex hormones and characteristics that differ from a strict male to female binary. Some people are born with atypical genitalia, specifically external genitals that don’t look male or female or are underdeveloped. Some are born with phallia, a condition where a baby is born without a penis, some born with a “mismatch” between their internal and external organs.
In all of these cases, the idea of normal, mismatched and properly developed genitalia and bodily presentation is conditional upon a male and female binary reinforced by the medical establishment — and to be clear, this gender binary has hurt people. For decades, intersex babies have suffered medical abuse because doctors perform unnecessary surgeries to “fit” these children into a female/male binary. These medically nonessential surgeries performed on children who cannot consent are a form of medical assault.
To be clear, this is not the same as gender affirming care performed on consenting individuals who are receiving hormone therapy and surgery to align their gender presentation with their identity. As major medical and mental health organizers assert, gender-affirming care is medically necessary and lifesaving healthcare for trans and nonbinary people.
And the vast majority of children who are having gender affirming surgery are cis ones. A June 2024 study found that the vast majority of minors undergoing gender-affirming surgeries were cis children. This did not include intersex people who underwent surgery or people who received surgery for an illness or injury. About 97 percent of 150 cases where minors received gender affirming surgery in 2019 were chest reduction surgery performed on cis boys. This surgery is commonly performed on boys with gynecomastia, or develop enlarged breasts due to a hormone imbalance.
So for many, the decisions expected on these Supreme Court cases may seem confined to sports but in actuality, they have profound ramifications not only for cis women but also amid the growing escalation and legitimization of eugenics in the United States.
It’s no mistake that earlier this month, Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, president of the Lemkin Institute, stated that the U.S. is in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.” Dr. Gregory Santon, former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, flags “a hardening of categories” surrounding gender in a “totalitarian” way.
Stanton argues that this is rooted in Nazi ideology’s surrounding gender — this same regime that killed many LGBTQIA individuals in the name of a natural “binary.” As Von Joeden-Forgey said, the queer community, alongside other “minority groups, tends to be a kind of canary in the coal mine.”
Even the fact that discussions of the trans sports ban foreground its potential implications for cis women (or that this is the primary concern voiced by Barrett) showcases whose bodies take priority.
This framework reflects how members of the feminist movement have used and presently do use the movement to justify the very anti-trans exclusion that will harm them. Some call themselves trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs); these women believe that codifying and protecting trans women’s rights threatens the rights of cis women and have even partnered with some conservative groups because of their commitment to enforce what it means to be a “biological woman.”
As history can show us, it’s exactly the opposite — first, feminism is rooted in equity for all people, all women, not just cis women. Because protecting trans women from medical violence like sex verification testing and challenging people and organizations that police who a woman is, protects all women.
Emma Cieslik is a museum worker and public historian.
The racist felon in the White House has sunk to what many people consider a new low, with his posting the disgusting depiction of the Obamas on his social media site. The depths to which he will sink would be considered unfathomable to many. But there is nothing we should think him incapable of. With this latest post, and refusal to apologize, I have to question the principles and decency of anyone, who still in any way, is willing to support him.
I once thought to give people taken in by his lies and carnival barker routine, the benefit of the doubt. I had the benefit of always knowing Trump was a liar and slimeball, having met him years ago in New York. I understood he learned well at the feet of his mentor, Roy Cohn, who was one of the more disgusting figures in New York politics. But not everyone knew that history. But now, after his behavior and actions, during the first year of his second term, I will not give the benefit of the doubt to anyone. If you still stand with the felon, you are a person with no principles, or decency, yourself. If you still support him you are standing with a man who first glorified the murder of a VA nurse, Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis, calling him a domestic terrorist. A man who said the ICE agents who did it were just doing their job. He did the same when they murdered Renee Good in cold blood, calling her a ‘domestic terrorist.’ He supported his agents acting like the Gestapo when taking a five-year-old boy into custody on his front stoop.
The felon went to Davos and in a stunning attack on our allies, claimed the men and women in their military never joined us on the front lines in Afghanistan, insulting all those who fought, and died, with our troops. He was either too dumb to know, or chose to disregard, that Article 5, a critical clause in the NATO pact, which means an armed attack on one member of the alliance will be treated as an attack on all members, was only invoked once in NATO’s history, and that was after the Islamist terrorists attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001.
He is destroying our country, and all our credibility around the world. He bows down to Putin and other despots. He clearly wants to be King of our country, and now an Emperor in the eyes of the world, as he threatens Greenland, and threatens to attack numerous other countries.
The problem those sycophants have, is I believe the people of the United States will finally understand he is destroying what is best in their lives. They will rise up and depose him; they will do it with their votes. Many of those who believed his lies and promises, are now seeing him as the “Emperor with no clothes.” He lied to them, and fooled enough of them, to win the election. They are waking up to the fact he is more senile than they thought Biden was, and clearly much less intelligent. They are seeing him for the grifter he is and finding out he cares not a bit for them, or their welfare. He clearly couldn’t care less that their grocery prices are going up, their rents are going up, their heating costs are going up, and for some, their healthcare costs are tripling. None of that bothers him in the least. He cares more about getting gift planes from Qatar, selling crypto coins, seeing Melania make money on a weird so-called documentary, and giving tax breaks to his rich friends and corporations.
The American people have fought a revolution before. We fought a king and won. This revolution may look different from that, and from the French Revolution. We may man/woman the barricades but will do so without guns. We will win with our votes.
The wealthy like Jeff Bezos, and others who see themselves as American nobility, corporate and media giants, who think the felon will make them even richer if they kneel before him, will in the long run be very disappointed. He has some power for a few more years, but even that will be curtailed when Democrats take back Congress in January 2027.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
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